Back Issues: After Apartheid

In this week’s issue, Charlayne Hunter-Gault writes about South African President Jacob Zuma. Near the end of the piece, Hunter-Gault describes a speech given by Zuma at a meeting of government officials:

He began by talking about the government’s successes during the sixteen years of black-led rule. But then his tone grew sombre. Four years from now, South Africa will celebrate twenty years of freedom, he told the attentive audience. At that time, he said, “we will not be able to blame apartheid if some villages still have no water, no electricity, and no roads.”

The arduous and long-overdue process of transitioning from apartheid to a black-led government was the subject of several articles in The New Yorker in the nineteen-nineties. In “The Secret Revolution,” from the issue of April 11, 1994, Allister Sparks described the negotiations between President F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela which led to the end of apartheid. Sparks writes,

Reforming apartheid was an extremely difficult thing for South Africa’s white minority to contemplate. It was not simply a matter of abolishing racial segregation and admitting an oppressed minority into the mainstream of society, as the United States had done. Here empowering the black majority meant that it would take over control of the country. That was the daunting prospect that always turned reformism into Potemkinism.

Sparks gives a detailed analysis of the process by which de Klerk decided to reverse the direction of his National Party’s policies and release Mandela, citing the influence of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and the recent independence of South Africa’s neighbor, Namibia.

A crucial part of the transition to black-led government was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established by Mandela to examine the apartheid era. The New Yorker published two articles on the Truth Commission’s work. The first, “Recovering from Apartheid,” by Tina Rosenberg, appeared in the issue of November 1, 1996, and focussed on confessions by former police officers and state officials who came forward to seek amnesty for their crimes. The second, Michael Ignatieff’s “Digging Up the Dead,” examined the Truth Commission’s work from the point of view of the relatives of black political activists who were killed and tortured under the apartheid regime. “More than seven thousand people—mostly police, but also guerillas from the liberation movements—eventually applied for amnesty,” Ignatieff wrote. His piece examined two cases in which the victims’ relatives received some but not all of the answers they were seeking from the commission. Ignatieff concluded:

A moral order is too large and impalpable an aim to be achieved by any commission. Perhaps, at the beginning, the men and women of the Truth Commission thought they could draw a line under the past and turn to a clean page. But veterans of the process are now coming to terms with the fact that their work will never be done. Violence insinuated itself into the heart of the country’s institutions, into each race’s loyalty to its own. It will take generations to eliminate that violence, but at least now there is some measure of shared truth about it.
_The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—are available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.